At a time when people are exploring new ways to cut corner on time, when instant messaging and texting is preferred to phone calls, when communication is all about conveying in fewer words and lesser time, who’d have time to read through a well-written email newsletter?? Well, if you thought email newsletters have died out with floppy disks and dial-up internet connections, you got it wrong!
Studies show that email newsletters are still very much around and are on a march. Take for example MailChimp, an email marketing company which sends over 400 million emails a day. The company has witnessed a significant jump in its numbers in the past few years. From adding 5000 new users every day in 2012, the figures have doubled to become 10,000 new users every day in 2014. A smaller e-newsletter service TinyLetter, saw a 15 percent increase in the number of newsletters it sent last year. Experts say that this trend is here to stay, irrespective of the countervailing effects of instant messengers, social media and smart phones. No wonder newsletter is often referred as the ‘cockroach of internet’, that sticks around while you though it’s all out. Take a quick look on what makes this old-school web artefact, an ineluctable tool in online marketing.
Personal and Direct
One of the factors that keep email marketing on and marching is that unlike social media marketing, email is both personal and direct. Just the way a letter in your mailbox creates a personal feel, an email in your inbox addressed to you gives it a personal touch. This presumption of connection, of something personal makes it a good platform for newsletter publishers to reach their customers and prospects. Whether a person reads the newsletter is a matter of relevance (as discussed below). However, you can be sure of one thing- when your email hits the subscriber’s inbox, you’ve cleared the first step in communicating your message to your target audience. Your subscriber is just a click away from accessing your newsletter.
Maintaining Relationships
Email newsletter isn’t just about sharing factsheet with clients. It’s your company’s representation in your subscriber’s inbox! A well written and masterly designed newsletter if published regularly can help businesses improve client relations, create higher brand recall and boost sales. Keeping customers posted on what happening in the company, new offerings and offers act as gentle reminders that encourage customers to pay you a visit. It’s another way of telling that you exist! Publishing newsletters regularly is a marketing ploy that help companies maintain customer relationship without causing much dent on the marketing budget.
High Reach
According to a recent study by Ipsos, a global market research company, nearly 85 percent of the people who use the web also use email, compared to only 62 percent who use social networking sites. For an email marketer it means higher reach potential. In fact, for many, starting the day with email has become a habit, routine and ritual. The flourishing of smart phones with integrated push technology has made this even easier. People no more have to keep checking their inbox for new mails. Email push technology ensures that email is delivered on your mobile device without having to work to get it. Statistics show that forty percent of all emails are now viewed on smartphones. Email becoming an on the go affair, has made it a preferred medium for publishers to reach their customers and prospects.
Business Connection
Many consider social media as an alternative to email marketing. However both differ in its settings, moods and purpose. An average user logs into Facebook and other social media accounts for fun, leisure and networking. They would look into the latest posts and updates from friends and families, that being one of the reasons why many business ads and posts goes unnoticed in social media. Email on the other hand isn’t made for fun but for communication. With more people preferring instant messaging channels for personal communication, email is emerging as a more serious communication channel. This bring us back to the topic on how email marketing has outperformed social media marketing on customer reach and response.
Leveraging on Relevance
If you are getting a newsletter in your inbox it’s usually because you’ve subscribed to it or someone sends you the information because they think it’s relevant for you as a customer, prospect or associate. Whichever the case may me, all email newsletters come with an unsubscribe link, an option to exercise if the content is found irrelevant and uninteresting. In other words, when a newsletter keeps showing up in your inbox every fortnight or month, it is deemed to believe that its content is relevant and useful to you. The newsletter list being made up of opt-in subscribers stresses the fact that it’s the perfect audience for your products and services. By reaching this group, you will have a much higher chance of achieving sales than you would by targeting some anonymous group.
That’s not all! Email providers such as Gmail has segmented the inbox into primary, social and promotional folders to help keep emails organised and to keep the garbage in the trash. Users can now move their email to the respective folders within the inbox and mark the option- ‘do this for all future messages from this sender.’ Finding a place in the primary folder isn’t not just a matter of subject lines and email id, but also a matter of significance. That states why it’s important for marketers to develop content that’s not just right and informative, but also relevant and interesting to the reader. Uninteresting content has no place in this information rich world.
Statistics Speaks
If you’re not sold yet on the power of email newsletter, take a look at the findings by various marketing analytics companies.
– Email has higher conversion rates per session than search and social combined: Email: 4.16%, Search: 2.64%, Social: 0.48% (according to data compiled by Litmus)
– Email regularly offers better value per dollar spent than even search and paid ads- Email $40 for every $1 spent, Keyword Ads $17 for every $1 spent, Banner Ads $2 for every $1 spent (according to data compiled by Litmus).
– Facebook Business Page post only reaches 10-15% of that page’s fans, while the average email open rates range from 30-45%.
– Average add to cart rates per session: Email 10.91%, Search 7.09%, Social 2.28% (as per data compiled by Monetate).
– Average conversion rates per session: Email- 4.16%, Search- 2.64%, Social- 0.48% (as per data compiled by Monetate).
Many have tried to write-off e-newsletter as an obsolete marketing tool, but studies show that it’s here to stay! Maybe writing personal e-mails aren’t much popular anymore, but email will remain as a major communication tool, especially for business and formal communications. As The New York Times article puts it “Email first, because it is for and about me; social media next, because it is for and about me, my friends and professional peers; and finally, there is the anarchy of the web, which is about, well, everything.”
